


Shovels go to the best ditch-diggers.

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: Settle in and find your home [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Maria Hill's terrible horrible no good very bad weeks, Pepper Potts and her team of badass ladies, Pepper wants to save the world, hypercompetent women, ladies in the Tower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 00:47:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11817708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: But it's Eva who asks, in the oblique-casual tone that knows damn well it's fooling nobody but is going to keep the act up anyway, because that sends its own message, "Are you aware of what Captain Rogers is doing?"Maria looks at her and then closes her eyes. Takes a deep breath. And says, "Jesus Christ that's the most terrifying fucking question I've been asked in years."





	Shovels go to the best ditch-diggers.

**Author's Note:**

> Immediately follows [Good help is hard to find.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11524182)

Getting to the Tower and into the impersonal but extremely stylish comfort of her temporary suite turns out to be uneventful. Maria takes advantage of the also stylish comfort of the bathroom to scrub the last of that god-awful hotel off her skin and out of her hair, and throws on the beautifully plush housecoat. 

She also throws all of the clothing from the meagre suitcase she'd been able to pack when Homeland Security showed up for "protective custody" into the bag marked "laundry", because they also stink of too long in a cheap hotel. Then she eats the sushi, drinks the rest of the second half-bottle of merlot that she brought up from the car while watching _Whose Line Is It Anyway?_ and puts herself to bed when she can't keep her eyes open anymore. 

She wakes up the next morning in new extremely comfortable flannel pjs, in a really comfortable bed complete with incredibly high thread-count sheets, a down comforter, and down pillows, and with a prize-winning hangover. 

Two kinds of that hangover, really. One from the wine and Ardbeg, and one from living through the last couple weeks. 

Together they mean she gets up, perches on a decorative stool beside the toilet in the massive bathroom (with wonderful heated floors) until she's sure she's not going to retch, and takes a handful of Advil. She finds the strawberry-lemonade Pedialyte she'd been smart enough to ask for after her third glass of wine is right in the bathroom where she'd said to leave it, downs half of that, and finally takes a really, really hot bath followed by a really cold shower. 

She orders poached eggs and sourdough toast from one of the convenient screens and makes herself go through her early morning pilates. Her stomach only heaves once and her headache's easing a bit by the time her food gets up to her - pretty quick, given it's also acceptably good. 

Then she goes hunting through the dresser drawers for fresh clothes. That, at least, she is used to: there were so many times she'd need a fresh set of clothes waiting for her without having time to get any of her own that she can rattle off the basic specs for everything, including brand and size of underwear and bra she feels absolutely sure the minion sent for will be able to find anywhere in North America, without engaging her brain. 

And sure enough, everything's there: slacks, shirt, jacket, underwear, socks and half boots. Maria dries her hair, decides makeup can go fuck itself she's not even looking, and pulls on the clothes. 

By the time she's asking the computer display at the door to her suite for directions to de los Santos' office for the nine am meeting, she feels almost human. Definitely a lot more human than she's felt since Nick's alert - the one just before he was attacked. 

Admittedly a low bar, but you have to start somewhere. 

 

The first thing Maria notices is the cat. 

This is mostly because she doesn't have a chance to notice anything _before_ the cat: as the Legal Department secretary shows her in the door to the anteroom to de los Santos' office, something that Maria's admittedly over-stressed brain identifies as a goddamned miniature leopard _drops_ down from somewhere over the door to the floor in front of Maria's shoes - nearly getting itself killed or at least punted across the room in the process. 

Then a puff of air from somewhere around Maria's ankle - also something not great given her current startle reflex, and fuck is she glad she has pretty solid control over that - hits the mini-leopard in the face and it jumps back, skitters across the carpet, leaps up on a series of staggered shelves and then into a tunnel in the wall over the door between anteroom and office. 

Maria stares after it, and then stares at the secretary, who gives her a look of calm resignation. 

"That's Mono," the man says, the resignation just as much in his voice, the stress on the second syllable. "You get used to him. He doesn't actually bite or scratch unless you're legitimately harming him, in which case you kind of deserve it." 

At the same time de los Santos' voice comes from the part-open doorway calling, "I'm sorry! I thought he was asleep in his cave, or I'd've warned you!" 

The secretary steps back out and closes the door, leaving Maria to assimilate the comment about the cave, and the . . .design choices in the anteroom. 

It doesn't take more than one look to establish that _my cat comes to work with me_ is an understatement. 

Overall, the decor is very clean, very much "Zen via the reinterpretation of corporate America". Maria has no objections to that: it makes for clean lines, relative lack of visual clutter, and relatively few stupid modernistic flourishes. 

The colour-scheme is a white tinted just barely towards cream, with accents in a strong ebony and touches of jewel blue. The usual degrees, certificates and other framed proofs of competence are on the walls out here in the anteroom, along with the tasteful bookshelves showing Very Important Legal Texts which everyone knows never even get touched anymore, because the PDFs are infinitely more useful. 

All of that is exactly what you'd expect. 

It's just there's also what amounts to a jungle-gym or obstacle course for a cat running up the walls, with hanging suspension-bridges made of polished wooden boards strung together with very ornamental rope between elegant minimalist shelves, and several poles wrapped around with the same kind of sisal rope, and - 

So on. 

It's all very tasteful and attractive, but it's also definitely a cat jungle gym. 

It takes about fifteen seconds for Maria to make the assessment, and about then de los Santos' voice calls, "Come on in, and he's not over the door this time, promise." 

Maria takes the moment to shoot the Look at the door while de los Santos can't see her, and then wipes it off and goes into the inner office. 

De los Santos doing office-work manages to be both less intimidating and yet just as formidable as de los Santos in a more formal suit. She still seems to gravitate to deep, strong colours - a gold and a rich brown, today - but instead of actively weaponized femininity there's a sweater that capably straddles the line between cozy and elegant, a pleated chocolate brown skirt, and a pair of low-heeled dark-brown boots Maria has to admit she covets immediately. 

What catches Maria's eye most, though, is that while her hair's still pulled back into a tight bun, it doesn't look like she's taken a straightening iron to it first. The curls add texture and shape, and here and there wisps escape and frame her face in wispy corkscrew spirals. 

She also has a cat draped over her shoulders like a living scarf. And if anything, the inner office is that much more adapted for the cat: there's a toy made of a stick, a string and a set of feathers on the desk, and several other kinds of toys all over the floor, and in this room the jungle-gym spreads _across the ceiling_ rather than merely stringing along the walls where there aren't couches. 

"Like I said," de los Santos says, looking up with a bit of chagrin, seemingly fully aware that you can't really walk in here without Noticing the cat stuff. "My cat comes to work with me." 

"I see that," Maria replies, dryly, not bothering to pretend she's _not_ taking it all in. Or the little dishes in the corner, one full of kibble and the other showing signs of having some kind of wet food in it earlier, plus the porcelain little fountain, of all things, over on the total other side of the room. Or the big chest that presumably hides a cat-box of some kind, unless the thing's leash-trained enough to go for walks. And that's hard with a cat, or so Maria gathers. 

De los Santos gestures at the little arrangement of two elegant things that are a compromise between an arm-chair and a love-seat and probably have a name Maria can't be bothered to remember right now, and one arm-chair that clearly comes from the same set. They're arranged around a coffee-table over in the corner, looking out the full-wall windows - blue velvet and ebony wood, and the coffee-table a low ebony pedestal that looks like it's carved in the shape of a twisting tree, fluidly delicate branches holding up an opaque glass - or no, maybe it's quartz, quartz tabletop. 

Maria comes to the conclusion right there that the office-decor was based on the seating and the table, and not the other way around, especially once she sees that the wooden part of the seats is carved to match the branch-shapes. You'd expect it to clash with the clean lines of everything else, but it doesn't. It's almost like a kind of concrete calligraphy, three-dimensional blackwork: one piece of fanciful shape here, fading out into the perfect oval of the coffee-table and the shapes of the couch-seat-things, and then into the cleanness of the rest of the room.

"Art Nouveau," de los Santos says, like she's noticing Maria noticing. "And pretty low-key for Art Nouveau, really. It used to be in my grandfather's office, and since it was the one and only thing he owned that I desperately coveted naturally I almost had to fight my cousin to the death for it." 

"But only almost," Maria says, absent and almost on automatic. De los Santos reaches up to stroke her cat's head and smiles slightly. 

"I told him he could have the bedroom furniture and peace and quiet, or he could try to take the table and chaise set and I'd make his life hell until one of us died. He laughed, but after a minute I think he realized I was serious and went for the bedroom furniture. My grandmother doesn't actually like Art Nouveau," she adds, "so she was happy to move into something else when he died. She just put up with it for him, because he loved it." 

The cat leaps down from de los Santos shoulders as she stands up. She grimaces a little - Maria assumes from claws digging in - but just gathers up the folder and the tablet from her desk and follows Maria over to settle there. 

Now that the little monster's leapt up on a shelf and started grooming itself, Maria can see that her hind-brain's immediate tag of "mini-leopard" isn't that far off. "Bengal?" she asks, in a way that isn't really a question. De los Santos sighs. 

"An F-3, no less," she says, and Maria's eyebrows rise - she forgets exactly which number means what, but with a hybrid like the Bengal, by the time you're paying attention to F numbers they're not far enough away from wild on the non-domestic side. "An ex-friend got him for her girlfriend, and from an irresponsible breeder - who, I am happy to say, is no longer breeding them. The girlfriend couldn't handle him, of course, and neither could the ex-friend and they were going to just dump him somewhere. After a bit of a nasty fight I traded the friendship for the cat. I meant to find him a specialist home at the time . . ."

"And ended up being the specialist home instead," Maria finishes for her. 

"It's actually not as hard as you'd think," de los Santos notes, settling onto the other chaise and tucking her legs up beside her. Maria doesn't miss the determined air that this is a chat between at least friendly acquaintances, but she doesn't bother resisting it either, and sits back and crosses one leg over the other. "You just have to stop thinking about them like they're the kind of house-cat that you can ignore. It's a lot more like having a Jack Russell terrier or one of the husky breeds. Keep them occupied and entertained and they'll love you and be the best thing in your life." 

"Let them get bored or frustrated and kiss everything you own goodbye," Maria fills in. Not exactly an unusual story. 

"And get used to the smell of urine," de los Santos says, drolly. "I had the opportunity to build his enrichment into this office instead of grafting it in post-facto, so I took advantage of it. And I really did think he was asleep in his cave - " and de los Santos jabs her stylus at the sort of squashed-sphere with a round hole in it that sits up on a pillar over at the back of the room, " - or I would have warned you." 

Having finished grooming, the Bengal leaps down from his shelf, trots over to de los Santos' seat and jumps up to settle beside her, tuck his nose under his tail and go to sleep. Apparently. 

"How are you feeling?" de los Santos asks, and then adds, "And I do realize that's inevitably an 'other than that, how was the play, Mrs Lincoln?' type question, but such is the world, right now." 

Maria considers her answer for a couple seconds. Her head hurts still, faintly - more tension than hangover, probably. She suspects she's back to grinding her teeth in her sleep. Damn it. 

She decides to be honest, both because it's easier and because it's a kind of test of the waters. "It's already past nine and I haven't actually wanted to execute _or_ murder anyone yet, not even just for for sheer offensive stupidity and incompetence, which puts today head and shoulders above every day since HYDRA decided to assassinate Nick Fury," she says, baldly. 

"Excellent," de los Santos replies, dryly. "Good start. Did I tell you to call me Eva yesterday, by the way? I honestly can't remember. I know I was a _tad_ focused on other details." 

She manages that statement with the dignity of someone who damn well knows that they were actually a bit more like a really intensely focused predator staring down that day's kill, and has completely accepted that tendency in themselves, but isn't going to be gauche enough to talk about it. 

Maria's mouth wants to twitch. In a normal life, you wouldn't get so accustomed to that kind of subtext, but in Maria's it long ago became as familiar as the kind that says "oops, I forgot about this meeting and just barely got here on time, let's pretend I'm not flustered", or any of the other standards of a bureaucracy-adjacent life. 

"You have now," Maria replies. "And likewise 'Maria', please." 

Eva smiles at her and then gestures to the tablet she's holding with her stylus. "We will go over a lot of those details _in_ detail in just a bit, by the way. Exhaustive detail. Along with a review of the absurd harassment we've already received on your behalf and it's not even noon, so you're completely abreast of this bullshit." 

Maria snorts softly. "Yeah, I'll bet it's pretty damn special," she says, sticking with the blunt. Eva doesn't look concerned, though, which means that special or not, it's not actually that much of a problem. 

"Pepper should be joining us in about a half hour," Eva says, glancing at the clock. "She's been here since around five, in meetings with the team in Assam, but those should be winding down." 

"That time difference is brutal," Maria says, with feeling and from experience. It's not the absolute worst, but it's up there, rattling around at being exactly mismatched enough that there's no point in the day that you can manage to meet that's natural for both ends. 

"Mmm," Eva says, the noise a definite agreement. "But it does give us half an hour or so to make sure we're on the same page on the broad sweep before we have to get into finicky detail. Need coffee or tea or something, or should we just dive in?" 

 

After ten minutes or so, someone with all the nervousness and anxious movement that says "intern" louder than a flashing red light over their head brings in what turn out to be really, really good blueberry muffins and some kind of bergamot-lavender-something Ceylon tea. Maria's on her second muffin before she realizes that despite breakfast being less than an hour ago and not exactly small, she's still _hungry_. 

It means her body's decided to come off crisis-mode, and that the appetite-suppressing side-effects of the amphetamines she's been using to greater or lesser extent up until a few days ago are wearing off. At least this fucking disaster hadn't gone on _long_ enough for her to have anything meaningful in the way of withdrawal symptoms. And it means, finally, that something's relaxed enough to let her feel things like "hunger" and to act on them without having to think about it. 

That's nice. 

One of the little details everyone learns - or learned, Maria supposes, reminding herself to get used to the past tense - when they get deep enough into SHIELD to deal with the serious crises is that the answer to _how do you handle crises that need you alert for most of seventy-two, ninety-four, a-hundred-and-six hours?_ is _amphetamines, carefully administered, matched to your body-weight and SHIELD Medical's carefully-curated record of your responses._

In fact, in the first six months he'd been at SHIELD, Maria had made sure to track Steve down to explain that most of Phil's slightly - maybe more than slightly - embarrassing and awkward fanboy routine had been exactly that: Phil got awkward on stimulants, lost some of his brain-to-mouth filter, and while his _work_ stayed perfect, his interpersonal impulse control got a little shaky. 

She hadn't quite been able to handle the idea that Steve Rogers would go around the rest of his life thinking Phil was that much of an obnoxious verbal klutz all the time.

Different situations came with different protocols. She'd proceeded according to one of them the minute Nick'd ordered her in to DC, and then pushed into higher gear when it turned out he'd been attacked before she'd even got off the ground. She'd tapered down pretty quick after Insight, but she . . . hasn't been able to relax enough to go back to normal patterns, yet. Not until last night. 

But it's been low enough, and brief enough, that she doesn't feel wiped-out and slow-witted today. Just . . .wrung out, and suddenly noticing that she's hungry. There's a difference. 

Eva, true to her word, just skims over everything in the file for now. Maria actually laughs when, in the employment errata part, Eva makes a face and notes that in the interests of not breaking _too_ much protocol, on the basis that it exists for a reason, they are going to have to run Maria through a polygraph questioning session, and she hopes Maria's okay with that. 

"I'm just going to tell you now that I'll use it to see whether or not I've still got a grip on how to fool them," she says, bluntly. Eva laughs herself. 

"Please, feel free," she says. "The results go to the head of HR, Pepper, and me; they're otherwise confidential, and destroyed after our review. And _believe_ me, I am well aware of what they are and what they aren't - but they're a useful tool for _most_ hiring situations at this level, because most people can't entirely control physiological reactions and it can alert us to something we need to look at harder. If you really want to see whether you can make the machine believe your dog has orange eyebrows or you're secretly an exotic dancer named Tammy, knock yourself out. It's just the look of the thing." She shrugs. "We - Pepper, Ira and I - put a lot of work into creating the HR protocols we use, and we did it for solid reasons, so we try not to flout them too much even when it's a touch inconvenient to us. 

Maria acknowledges that with a nod. She knows the dance. Rules and protocols are a safety net, something you create to try and make up for inevitable human error. Get too caught up in them and they turn into a trap, of course, but on the other hand, slash too many holes in them and they don't work anymore. It's all about the balance, and all other things being equal, you go through protocol even if it's a formality. 

"We're already getting bleats about you needing to testify for Congress," Eva says, after they discuss a few other details - like how for the time being it's best if Maria lives at the Tower and they'll set up a suite to be modified how she wants it for the next few months - flicking forward a few pages on the tablet. "Currently we're being obstructive, and that's the plan for the next week or so to let you get your feet." 

She glances at Maria, and there's wry sympathy in her face. "I'd imagine the last while's been pretty much survival mode," she says. Maria exhales once, sharply. It's not a laugh. It just sort of fits in the same shape as one. 

"Still is," she says, still blunt because she's too tired not to be blunt. "So yeah. A couple days to try to get out of it would be nice." 

Eva makes a gesture of _there you go then_ with the hand not holding the tablet, which turns into one of dismissal. "The hearings have more than enough other people to chew over in the meantime," she says. "And considering the level of trampling they've already _done_ all over - for example - your legal rights, they can beat their head on a wall for a while." 

Exhaustion is hell on the impulse control, especially little impulses. Like the one to say, "You seem really ticked off about that," in a dry kind of understatement. 

Maria wouldn't normally say it. Not actually say it. It gives too much away, says way too much about what she's noticing and not noticing and what she finds interesting and that's the kind of thing people can use for stuff you don't want them to. But fuck, she's tired. 

And. Well. 

A memory keeps sliding back in, dragging at her attention. Like there's a magnetic pull from the present moment to that part of her mind and it can't help but come back out, which means her subconscious is probably trying to tell her it's important. And it probably is. 

Maria'd met former Director Carter, once. _Very_ shortly after Nick'd made Maria his Assistant Director. The Alzheimers' had been still in the very early stages, at the time, and Carter'd come in to talk to Nick about something. Maria never found out what. Then Nick had introduced them and managed a disappearing act, and on the basis that while she did have more work than any human should have, Maria also had manners, she'd asked Carter if she wanted coffee or tea. 

Okay. She had manners, and she also had enough human nature to want to talk to a legend, especially a legend who managed to become a legend against sexist bullshit that made everything Maria'd already dealt with, and would keep dealing with whether she liked it or not, look like tissue-paper and a primrose path. 

And it wasn't fucking tissue-paper and the path was on fucking _fire_ , which is what made Carter so goddamn impressive. 

They'd talked about that, and about a lot of things, and at some point the conversation came around to Margaret Carter looking at Maria with a kind of level, knowing look that didn't seem as old as she was - because it seemed like it was coming from someone who'd seen centuries go by, not just decades. 

_Let me tell you something that Nicholas has never managed to reconcile himself to, Ms Hill,_ she'd said, in her precise RP that was so precise that Maria still suspects that actually, the accent Margaret Carter'd been born to was something different. _The world doesn't actually make sense. There's no pattern, there's no guiding hand, there's nothing like it. When you get down to it, the entire universe is an absolute_ clusterfuck _of inexplicable happenstance._

Maria remembered how odd the word _fuck_ had sounded coming from someone the age of her grandmother, with the precision and accent in the way Carter talked. 

_Any sense we manage to make out of it is like finding a pattern in pi - brief, artificial and eventually lost in the random spew. And the upshot to this, young lady, is that you cannot plan for everything, and fundamentally, you are not in control. You can plan, and you should._ She'd raised a finger, admonitory. _You should plan. And well. And you should be careful, and paranoid, and all of the rest of it. But._

And then she'd looked distant and then sighed. _You must also recognize the point, when it comes, when if the worst happens there is nothing you can do to stop it. There comes a point where your choices may not even be certain death versus uncertain death, but only two uncertainties, but you still have to choose and to accept that you cannot control what happens._

She'd sat back. _Nicholas has never been able to take that on. He knows it, of course. He's a brilliant man. Never think otherwise, not even when it seems like he's being pig-headed and appallingly obtuse: he is a brilliant, brilliant man. So he does know it, but when he looks it in the face all he can see in it is despair. I've tried to talk to him about this and it got him nowhere, but I'll try again with you. Hopefully you can get it under you, and earlier than I did, too. It'll save you a lot of misery if you can. The universe is chaos, dear. But that means grace as well as doom - it's_ chaos _, not malice. You're not in control, but neither is your enemy, or anyone else. Sometimes that's a blessing and sometimes that's a curse and sometimes it's just goddamn annoying, but, Agent Hill, if you try to pretend it's not so you'll just make yourself crazy._

That memory tugs at another, one of Barton giving her the look she _actually hates_ , and hates all the more because he doesn't mean anything by it but he still gets it sometimes. And she can't even complain, because it's not like he isn't entitled. The man's been through more than enough shit in his life to be entitled to a lot more in the way of looks that imply pained experience than he uses. And it still pisses her off. Viscerally. 

Which is probably why the echo is so vivid, because she'd been stamping on the desire to retaliate for nothing. 

So now she can see him shrugging and saying, _Look there comes a point where your choice is simple: you trust someone or you don't. And it's a decision. And sometimes shit gets to the point where if you don't choose to trust, then there's no point. Sometimes that moment is upfront and simple because it's a matter of whether or not you live through the next thirty seconds, and sometimes it's a fucking nightmare because it's whether or not you go crazy picking at the basis of reality until it comes unglued but it's the same thing. Eventually you have to stop shaking and just let the dice roll and go with it._

He'd been talking about Natasha, trying to explain both why he'd done what he'd done, and why the eighteen year old Black Widow had decided to trust _him_. And she'd wanted to punch him at the time, for being a condescending, fatalistic asshole while she, and Phil, and Nick, had to clean up the consequences of his goddamn choices. She'd wanted to punch him even more because he'd been _right_ and the result had been Natasha coming to SHIELD and every damn miracle since, and Barton could be so fucking annoying that way. 

But right now Maria looks at where _she's_ at, and she'll own that the fact of the matter is that asshole is (and _God_ she hopes it's "is", that it's still present tense, that he's still alive somewhere) right, and here she is. 

She was closer to the wire in that fucking hotel-room than she wants to admit to herself. Closer to the point where she _did_ say _fuck this, fuck you_ and walk out, a plague on _everyone's fucking house_ \- and she can't do that. She knows she can't. Clint can, maybe even Natasha can if Barton's still around to give her an anchor even as they flip everyone else off, but Maria can't. 

She can't give the whole of civilization the middle finger and disappear into her own, because then she'll have _nothing_ , and it'll go bad so fast. So fast, and _so_ very bad. Maria doesn't even want to know what would come out of that, wearing her face. But it would be ugly. 

And it sure as hell looks, as far as she can see, that her only chance of not staying in the equivalent of that hotel room and everything it means until her control snaps and she's gone anyway is . . .well, this. And _this_? This is taking her sorry, worn-out, exhausted, shit-kicked ass into the home territory of two of the most terrifyingly intelligent women, _people_ , she's ever met, when all she really has to offer or trade on is - not to be _too_ dramatic about it - some kind of allegiance. 

At that point, what the _fuck_ is the point of staying on guard? Because she sure as fuck doesn't know. It'll be great because they're genuine, or they're not genuine and she'll have to light it all on fucking fire later, but for now, she doesn't even care. 

So she's not. So she doesn't bother to hide. Because she's already there, so why the fuck go to all that work? 

So she just up and says, _You seem really ticked off about that._ Like she never normally would. 

Maria sort of expects Eva to say something like _well aren't you?_ And of course Maria is. Angry, and _insulted_ , and offended, and she'll feel that way even more once she feels less like something her sister's geriatric dog managed to drag in. (Through the mud.) And that's without even touching the way it weaves into her current existential crisis. 

(That's what this is, isn't it. It's an existential crisis. _Fuck_ , she thought she'd at least get past forty-five before she had to have one of those.) 

Instead Eva gives her a tight smile and says, "I didn't go into law for the glamour and high wages." 

It startles Maria into a short bark of a laugh, and out of her semi-reverie. But it's a fair point.

On her mother's side, Eva de los Santos comes from one of the most quietly wealthy families in Europe, the kind you don't notice until you start paying close attention to how many roads lead back to them. They aren't quite nobility, as such, although they were the kind of "not-quite-nobility" who can still trace their family back to some mediaeval aristocrat and who sometime around the eighteen-hundreds probably _decided_ to stop keeping themselves in the noble circles because those circles kept getting a bit hot to handle.

SHIELD had kept an eye on them, even long before Eva stepped out of her fourth ( _fourth_ ) degree in law and started making everyone sit up and pay attention. The family'd been anti-Franco, which put them on SHIELD's radar as a potential resource, as well as a potential problem since they were obviously willing to rock the boat. They'd never been formally courted, but SHIELD had used connections with them to put people in the right place at the right time, more than once. They had spent a large chunk of the mid-twentieth century travelling between five or six different estates in Australia, England, the US and the Dominican Republic, which made them really useful even at one remove. 

The DR was where Eva's mother had decided to play reverse Cinderella, falling head over heels for the trumpet player in an ensemble hired for one of her parents' parties and spending the next six days running around the whole damn place trying to figure out who was behind the stage name, tracking him to his parents' run-down house and then inviting him, apparently almost hesitantly, out for dinner. 

Her mother had a fit; according to the file, though, her _father_ decided that any daughter who went through that much effort to find the man in the first place would take one look at an ultimatum - even one as dire as "if you get involved with this man, I'll disinherit you" - and tell him to go get fucked. At the least. And he also decided - again according to the file, written by an agent whose work had put him in pretty close proximity to the family - that he wasn't interested in losing a daughter and definitely not over something like her falling in love with a black man with no money. 

His wife had put on various performances worthy of opera, but only in private, and only until her daughter told her that if she didn't stop making the man uncomfortable, she - the daughter - would move out. Permanently. 

Four years later it'd all blown over: Eva had been born, and according to the file, her mother was the kind of woman who doted without reservation or even sanity on her grandchildren, and since any complaint about their father would imply there was or even _could be_ something wrong with said grandchildren, Eva's father became a Beloved Son of the Family more or less the day the pregnancy was announced. 

Maria had spent much of the file wondering how the hell the man had coped with a bunch of crazy Spanish semi-aristo in-laws, but apparently he'd got on great with everyone, especially once his mother-in-law came around. 

He ran and taught at a boarding school he'd founded, a music-centred but full-curriculum academy for underprivileged children. It had a global draw, but it mostly eschewed attention and there was a pretty emphatic comment from him at one point about the children attending being children, and students, not mascots. Eva's mother, brother and sister-in-law run the family businesses, and those businesses relatively low-profile but they're still big money, and big sway. 

If all Eva had wanted was power, status and money, she could have stayed home with them. 

Instead, she'd gone to law school at the University of Navarre _very_ young; then she'd done another undergrad at Oxford, then done a post-grad at Harvard, and then done another post-grad at Oxford, because clearly degrees were like some kind of Pokémon and she needed to collect them all. Maria supposes that's what you _do_ when your IQ is too high for your own good and money's not just not a barrier, but not even relevant. 

She was roughly the same age as Stark, several years older than Maria. She'd relocated to the US sometime in her twenties and got her citizenship; in the US she'd worked both defense and prosecution in criminal law before aiming at corporate and contract law, a little bit like a lioness aiming at someone's throat. She hadn't seemed to care that being a woman in the law, and being a mixed woman in the law, were both going to make her life difficult - maybe that was the whole semi-aristocratic thing, or maybe she was just that person, where every barrier you put in front of her just got her angry and made her hit harder. Would still have been damn hard work, though. 

You could be as cynical as you wanted, but whatever you decided the _reason_ was, you couldn't deny that de los Santos clearly cared about the law, in and of itself. A lot. 

Maria wasn't actually that cynical about it: after Eva had gone to Stark Industries, and Martin'd thrown his fit, Maria'd dug into the file on de los Santos to get a sense of why, and one of the things she'd watched was a speech Eva'd given a graduating law-school class.

She'd been struck, to start with, by how magnetic the woman was. It was almost like watching Fury speak or - not that Maria would _ever_ let on to the man himself - Stark, on those few occasions when you could get him to stop being a fucking shit-show and really pay attention to what he was talking about. Then she'd been struck by how if de los Santos _didn't_ fully, passionately believe in what she was saying, she was a _damn_ good actress. 

And thirdly, that everything in the speech was about law as the servant of a just society. As its skeleton, its framework. About how law was the bluntest, crudest outline, and that's why it needed people to learn it into its finest detail and take other people through it. 

About how law didn't make justice, law _served_ justice, and how a wrongful conviction and a wrongful acquittal, _any_ wrongful judgement, they all did brutal violence to justice, and in turn to the society justice served. That when you defend a client, you serve the same law and justice as when you prosecute a defendant, and vice versa; and about how mediating a contract and mediating a divorce demanded the _same_ integrity as the criminal courtroom, because those too were central to letting society function. How now they were graduating, this would be their responsibility. 

Generally speaking, that kind of talk was congratulatory and complimentary: well done, here's your degree, go, be free. De los Santos' had been a challenge. Or possibly a warning. 

Maria still kind of wonders what Pepper said, or did, or offered, or _what_ , to get de los Santos to agree to sign on. Other than be completely accommodating to the cat, anyway. 

She also tries to shake off the fucking wandering mind she seems to have acquired. Like her entire goddamn psyche's taken her decision to trust that she isn't making the biggest mistake of her life as a sign it can just relax. Including her fucking basic attention-span. 

In the few seconds Maria's been woolgathering, Eva's been looking thoughtful. Now she glances upwards, as if gathering her thoughts. 

"A handful of people just saved the world from more death and suffering than we've seen in thousands of years," she says, considered and deliberate. "The entire world. All of it. And _years_ of it, of that death and suffering, not just one day." Her mouth tightens, as does her jaw. "Because the worst part about what those lunatics almost did is that it wouldn't've even given them what they wanted. 

"Autocracies don't reign peacefully," she says, meeting Maria's gaze. "They never have, and they never will. Every tiny measure of peace and just, orderly society we have ever managed to attain, as a species, arises from the cooperative mutual consent of governing and governed and everything else is violence. Always has been. And the bloodier their means of creation, the bloodier their means of maintenance - all they would have done is turn every single fucking day into an endless litany of brutality and death _even for themselves_. That's the _worst part_ , how they're so _stupid_ ," she says, and for a split second there's something other than flawless Standard American English to her accent, something of - Maria suspects - her father's, because it's sharper than she'd expect from Castilian Spanish. "Their own _fucking_ lives would have become worse. They'd've blamed that on everyone else, but it still would have. Over the whole goddamn world." 

Her voice doesn't get any louder, but it does start sounding almost like a laser in its intensity, before she stops. Her exhale isn't a sigh so much as a release, and when she speaks again it's the voice Maria's heard in the courtroom recordings, words measured and precise, accent invisible. "And in what is probably the single solitary convincing argument that _some_ power or other has some ability to influence causality - which is the closest you will ever hear me to granting there might be some kind of god out there - _and_ that power likes at least a few of us, you, Captain Rogers, Agent Romanoff and Airman Wilson managed to keep this from happening." 

Maria's not totally shocked that de los Santos already knows Wilson's former rank, not to mention his name. She's not shocked - but she is a bit impressed. Under the part of her that's . . . something. 

She can't actually think about what that something is, or she might cry, and she is _not_ up for crying in front of someone she met less than a day ago today. She's just not. 

Eva goes on, crisply, like she's taking some steps away from the moment of more intense, unsteady emotion, "In response to which the leaders of not just this fucking country but a great many others are electing to act like the whole fucking mess is somehow your fault. Believe me, just the principle of the thing is more than enough to have me completely livid, never mind anything else and I'm going to make them fucking regret it. So yes. Just to start with, on that one, I'm ticked off." 

The humour of the last sentence is mordant. Maria takes a deep breath. 

She has to, because her throat actually tightened. Closed. She doesn't want to think about having saved the world, at this point. Then she'll really come unglued. 

Christ she misses Phil so much right now. 

"Fair enough," she says. "Sorry," she adds, and she's not even sure why. "I'm a bit - " 

She doesn't even know how to finish that sentence. Even in her own head. 

"Yes, well, you haven't gone on a homicidal spree despite all the provocation," Eva replies, dryly. "I think the world can spot you some very minor interpersonal stiltedness, which I'm only even remarking on so far as to forgive because you felt the need to apologize." 

It's not really humour, the laughter that bubbles up out of her throat. Actually in point of fact, it's really _not_ humour. That's why she does wrestle it back down. 

Maria leans forward and puts her face in her hands for a second, leaning her elbows on her knees. She tries to get a grip and then sits up. "Okay. Can we just - " she says, and isn't sure how that sentence ends. 

The really disconcerting part is first that somehow she feels like Eva knows exactly what she means, even if Maria herself doesn't know what she's trying to _say_ , and second that she seems completely amenable to going with it. 

"We need more coffee," she says. She glances the tablet she's holding, waking it up. "Pepper should be done soon anyway, and if she isn't I'm sending Harker in to get her." 

 

Pepper arrives about five minutes later. 

Her arrival is heralded by the cat's head suddenly perking right up, and then the whole cat making a startling leap up two shelves on the walls and out through the tunnel to the outer room. Seconds later there's a short stifled yelp, and then Pepper's voice saying very clearly, "Mono, you're going to fucking kill me one of these days." 

"He loves you," Eva calls, raising her voice and getting up to pull out another mug from the side-board. 

"A lot of things that are going to fucking kill me one of these days love me," Pepper says, half-laughing and half-sour as she comes in the room, holding the cat against her chest in one arm and her own tablet in the other. 

Her hair is in a tight french braid and, on the scale of Pepper Potts Wardrobe, she's wearing a fairly pedestrian skirt and blouse. She kicks off her heels as she closes the door behind her. 

"Remind me that the next time I actually go to Guwahati that I need to buy Gayatri something very, very nice," Pepper says, going over to put the cat down on his little cave and then coming back to drop herself into one of the chair-couches. "Or fund a scholarship or a grant or whatever it is she actually wants. She has more patience with the people she's shepherding than you could expect from a statue, we would be lost without her, and she is _way_ too forgiving." 

She looks at Maria and asks, "Sleep well?" 

"I drank both of the half-bottles of wine in your limo," Maria admits, frankly. "I slept fine. Good wine," she adds, because it had been. 

"The vineyard belongs to the family of my best friend from university," Pepper says. "We've more or less lost touch, but I still buy way, way too much wine from her parents every year. I can give you their website." She pauses and adds, "Do _not_ judge the wine by the website. Her father does it. He's a much better vintner than a site admin." 

Eva passes her some kind of tea in another mug and says, "It's a good vineyard. I even got my brother to admit that American wine might be worth drinking, which, believe me, is a concession. But," she adds, "I'm going to be the disciplined one and get us through the things we can get out of the way." 

The phrasing catches Maria's attention, and she quirks one eyebrow at the implication that there are going to be things they can't "get out of the way", but she supposes they'll get there when they get there. She can wait. 

Though getting anything out of the way does take time, and Maria shoves her reluctant brain into something like work mode, because it will actually make everything a goddamn hell of a lot easier if she makes some important decisions now. They're the kind of decisions that result in a bunch of stuff for _other people_ to do, the kind of decisions that set things in motion, so that once she's made them she can go collapse into a hot bath for the next week and when she emerges, parboiled and hopefully with a clearer head, a bunch of new things will be ready to work with. Set up. That kind of thing. 

Things like - "There are people I'll want to bring in," she says, and then makes a face. "Assuming they'll come and assuming they're not dead." Jesus, she thinks: she has people to catch up on. She hasn't been trying yet, because with Homeland Security over her fucking shoulder it wasn't worth it, but now - 

She can start that tomorrow. 

Pepper gives her a slightly sardonic look. "Oh no," she says, dryly, "you want me to hire more undoubtedly high-value employees who can integrate quickly with you into a working unit? And who have undoubtedly already had to survive scrutiny by _your_ post-Insight paranoia to be considered? At a point where I desperately need more warm bodies anyway? Whatever will I do. Help." 

Eva's had to put down her coffee in order to keep from spilling it, laughing. 

Maria puts a hand to her face, but she's suppressing a rueful smile, too. "Look," she says, "I just spent way too much fucking time trapped with idiots who actually didn't see the contradiction between thinking that Natasha would be able to contact me without their knowledge _and_ thinking that they could track her down, okay, and I have a hangover. My parameters are askew." 

"Oh god I thought she was going to kill someone," Pepper says, closing her eyes in a kind of minimalist mock-shudder. "Natasha, I mean, at the session."

"You and me both," Maria says. She reaches for her coffee, finds it's the last swallow and glances at Eva with a question in her expression - _is there more of this?_

Eva reaches out for her cup and gets up, and Maria blinks but then decides not to point out she could have got it herself. It occurs to her that this _is_ Eva's office, and given what Maria'd read about her grandmother, little Eva probably did grow up with Hostess Etiquette hammered into her head like a spike. 

"The last time I saw that expression," Pepper goes on, "she slammed Justin Hammer's face into a desk and we were about to all get killed by rogue drones." She hesitates before asking, "Is she okay?" 

Maria probably stares a little more blankly than she'd normally want to, as she tries to figure out where the hell Pepper would even _be_ , on any scale of Natasha's comfort with people knowing about - 

Fuck it. She gives up: Nat and Pepper used to drink together, Nat gave Pepper advice on how to handle Stark's crazy, that's . . .probably good enough. If not, hey, Nat can have an actual _reason_ to be upset with her, instead of being stuck with overflow from Nick's mistake that neither of them can do anything about. 

"Not really," Maria replies. She shrugs a little helplessly, palms open. Then she takes the coffee from Eva. "She's not dead. Putin's _still_ alive, along with a few other people less generally well known but still pretty . . . indicative, so by this point I figure Barton has to be alive, so we're probably not looking at a vigilante spree to clean house before suicide, but that's pretty much all I've got right now." She considers, and adds, "If I'm right, we'll probably start getting signs of life in the next couple days? Post-cards, packages, random texts, something." 

Pepper sighs, and gets a kind of inward, speculative look that Maria's never seen on her before - not that she'd've had that much opportunity to, but still. It feels New. "This must've hit her hard," she says, with a sad kind of wistfulness, although Maria couldn't say what she's wistful for. 

"The one upside is, Nat's pretty good at surviving shit that hits her hard," Maria says, and then adds after hesitating again, "just . . . if she likes you enough to be uncomfortable putting up a full front, she may be a bit . . . weird, for a while." 

"Believe me," Pepper says, with feeling that Maria doesn't expect, "these days I have a lot more first-hand sympathy for Being Weird For A While than I used to." 

"You weren't that weird," Eva demurs, and Pepper gives her a Look. 

"I cried for half an hour while draped over your cousin's horse," she says. "Snuffling horse-hair and telling him how terrible I felt." 

"Horses do that," she says, breezily. "Especially that one. Coriander is very good at getting across that he is very big and will kick everything scary to death so you can relax for a bit. It gets right into the lizard-brain." 

She glances at Maria and adds, "I talked her into staying at my cousin's equine therapy retreat for a weekend. In addition to the equine therapy, it's also part of his and my sister-in-law's showpieces on Why Horses Work Better When You Just Damn Well Acknowledge That They Are A Herd Animal And Act Accordingly." Maria can _hear_ the capitals. "As a result, one of Simón's Shire stallions is at once absolutely certain that his role is to protect the herd from predators, at yet at the same time also confidently aware that he is more than six feet high _at the shoulder_ and weighs more than two thousand pounds, and so he basically fears nothing. It makes him a very calm and calming animal." 

Maria's not exactly a horse person, but she does know enough to take the "at the shoulder" and then add another, what, two feet or so for the head, and reflects that a horse that tall probably wouldn't have to be nervous of much. 

"He's very good for people with PTSD," Eva adds, blithely. "Although Simón did have one little boy refuse to get _down_ for quite a while. The little boy said it was fine, Coriander was more than big enough, he could just sleep up there for the night where he was safe. Simón eventually coaxed him off by explaining that he might fall off and hurt himself while he was asleep and dreaming, and then Coriander would be upset." 

"Stallion?" Maria asks - she's _not_ a horse person, but she does feel like that's not usual. 

"Oh yes," Eva says. "And if you ever give either my sister-in-law or my cousin so much as an _inch_ they will explain to you at length, with citations, and probably with diagrams, how stallions are only a problem because humans do everything wrong and understand nothing." 

" . . . I'd buy it," Maria grants. "I mean I don't even have to hear the rest of it, people do everything wrong and understand nothing all the time, I'm absolutely willing to believe it's happened there too." She pauses and says, "Even more than willing, actually, because they think they understand because we've been fucking around with horses for a long time. Those are the worst." 

They go over Maria's contract ("I essentially adapted the one I wrote up for myself," Eva says, and Maria fights the urge to giggle - it makes sense, but that doesn't stop the sentence from being hysterically funny), and frankly the salary makes Maria uncomfortable with how _high_ it is. 

"It's my Thing," Pepper says, and now she's entirely serious. "I made myself not cut down from what the company used to pay Tony too - if you want I can go over how I set up a bunch of scholarships and grants out of what I so can't even imagine ever needing, but I honestly insist that everyone in the upper tiers of this company draw salary at _least_ on par with the mode salary paid to middle-aged white men doing the same job. It's an issue of precedent." She glances at her CLO and says, dryly, "I think Eva's the only person I haven't had this conversation with, which is telling." 

"That's because I'm the only one used to thinking about money _explicitly_ as a matter of status," Eva says, equally dry. "Which says all kinds of things about how I grew up, I know, but it has its uses and it's not like SI is on narrow margins. So I just looked up what the median and mode were, came up with an appropriate figure to fit in, and added ten percent, and here we are." 

Maria is just quick enough with her own self-control not to flat out offer the story of walking up to Phil after the recruitment session for SHIELD aimed at people heading out of the military and informing him that he'd be stupid not to recruit her. It's the kind of story she _would_ offer, this kind of moment, normally, but she doesn't . . . really want to talk about that right now. 

She'd known exactly what she was signing herself up for, by doing it. She _knew_. And it said a lot of things about her career that the river of Hell Phil proceeded to throw her into in order to see if she could live up to her own emphatic press doesn't even begin to count among the worst experiences of her life. Not even in the top ten. 

Nobody died that week, which automatically puts it below the top ten. 

But she doesn't want to talk about that right now. 

"Right," she says, instead. "That makes sense." Then she _looks_ at the number and says, "What do you even do with that kind of money?" 

"I'm helping a lot of women to get post-secondary degrees," Pepper says, brightly. "And helping to open girls' schools where for some reason they can't just go to schools, or it's dangerous or they're at a disadvantage or . . .whatever. And funding women's clinics. And basically every single time some fucking stiffnecked asshole pisses me off I go spend money setting up some kind of _something_ to help turn the world into exactly what he hates." She pauses. "Usually 'he'. Not always." 

"Shirley Dobson," Eva prompts, and Maria swears she sees Pepper's eyes _actually flash_ and isn't sure that's her own mind coming up with a metaphor. 

"Oh god that fucking c - " Pepper stops herself and, a little theatrically, reins in whatever she was about to say. "I don't like her," she says, in a put-on cheerful-sweet voice and Maria starts laughing again. "And you know what after having to listen to her absolute _garbage_ for more than five minutes one day - don't ask - I discovered that it turns out there are very few programs set up to help low-income transgender women get properly designed underwear? Of any kind? And it seemed to me that this was terribly unfair and something that money could ameliorate! So she's managed to do some good in the world. In spite of herself. I even sent her a card to let her know. I'm _shocked_ that didn't end up in the press - I was waiting for it. I was _ready_." 

Maria basically can't help laughing a little bit, at this point, because Pepper seems genuinely disappointed she didn't get a chance to fight it out with the woman in the public eye. She looks thoughtful. "I should find out what she's upset about this week, so I can support it," she adds. "I mean it's always the same stuff basically but keeping an eye on the actual rotation helps keep things fresh." 

Eva's laughing at her at this point too, so Maria feels better. 

Maria doesn't _miss_ the part where Pepper and Eva are throwing open the doors of female camaraderie, how much everything about this is all about making her one of the girls. It's pretty goddamn obvious and Maria hasn't been concussed into recurring TBI symptoms lately, which is just about what she'd need to be in order to miss it, and even then - probably not. 

But the thing is . . . the thing is that there's nothing fake about it. Nothing. It's genuine. It's not the version that's luring someone into letting their guard down, it's the version where it's just that they've already _decided_ that this is how it's going to be, how it should be, and they're just going to act accordingly. Maria's had just enough experience to know the difference. 

Without having so much experience, she reflects wryly, that not being able to see the obvious signs just makes you more sure that this time it's _really cleverly hidden_. It's amazing how many of the women she's worked with have that much, and not even from things you'd _think_ would lead to that kind of paranoia. Actually, Natasha's was one of the least prominent. It's always made Maria reflect on the shit people manage to do to each other. 

And the other thing is, Christ she knows she could use it. 

God, she's tired. 

They go back to cover logistics in more detail, like Maria living in the Tower until she feels pretty sure that nobody's going to bother assassinating or kidnapping her - Eva noting dryly that they'll just defer to what Maria thinks appropriate security measures are on that one - with more attention on _how_ likely that is, what should be put under surveillance already to see first signs, all of that shit. They cover internal department divisions. They cover the layers of response to the inevitable legal bullshit that's going to come. All of it. 

Maria's right back into bitter misanthropic resentment about society by the end of that one, and even more convinced that she has got to take this opportunity to dig in and remember why telling everything to fuck itself and going off is a bad idea, and won't get her what she wants, and will end with her becoming something she hates. Fuck. 

. . . she misses Nick. For a minute it's like a deep ache in her chest, because this was one of the things they both understood so well they never even had to explain, or even try. That felt like recognizing someone you lost and missed and forgot you lost and missed, when you saw it in the other person. The understanding that humanity is a fucking garbage-heap of petty mean jerks and assholes and you have to protect it and try to keep its systems working and the machine that protects everyone in one piece because the only thing worse than the machine is when the machine breaks down. 

Or, Maria thinks bitterly, in terms of current events - when someone takes a fucking wrench to it. Fuck Alexander Pierce. When she thinks about him she tries to remind herself that the important part is he died literally lying in the wreckage of all his failures and broken dreams, and that's going to have to make up for the part where he bled out in less than ten minutes and probably less than overwhelming agony, thanks to adrenaline and endorphin responses to major gunshot wounds. 

Fucking son of a _bitch_. 

But she has to shake that off. 

Then Pepper sketches out her plans for the SI plant in Assam, which is pretty damn ambitious and is _definitely_ going to require a pretty systemic overhaul of StarkSec training - mostly for systematic leadership ethics and conflict resolution. Which is not what they're going to expect, but that's life sometimes. And Maria lets her mind throw itself at that as a deeply welcome distraction: if everything works, not only will this be a major step towards renewable non-environmentally-damaging electricity production, but on top of that it should go a _fuck_ of a long way to providing better jobs, better standard of living and better security to the whole region, which in turn should help stabilize things. 

It's amazing how much less inclined people get to go out and join violent insurgent groups when they feel _secure_ about food on the table, a comfortable home, a good life for their kids, and nobody wiping their existence off the map of the future. By which Maria means not amazing at all because it's basic fucking common sense, but then, when have humans been good at using that? 

"Nobody has to live in the compound," Pepper notes, "and we are absolutely going to have effective free transport from home for any employees during the construction phase and afterwards, but I am also insisting on maintaining SI hiring parity, which means half of the people working on this project are going to be women, and that's going to get me a lot of single women, I know. Consultation result was, having onsite quarters of various configurations would make people feel much happier and safer by just eliminating the need for people who don't feel comfortable doing so to travel any distance. Biggest positive response was to stuff based on how a lot of universities are setting up cluster-housing and shared housing, in contrast to traditional dorms, so that's what we're going with - four roommates in a fully fixtured home, or in some cases suites with private bathrooms but arranged four or five around a common kitchen, that kind of thing." 

"Gender segregated?" Maria asks, and Pepper nods. 

"As base policy, for single people - specific instances, like say siblings of different genders, or something like that, those can be referred to the ombudsperson for review and so on. That was the best compromise we could come up with. And then speak Very Calmly and Helpfully when explaining if we have to, if something makes the media throw a fit. Basically like here, just - slightly different triggers for fits. There's also married couples' housing, and family housing. There will be an on-site daycare, school and clinic." 

"I'm just going to assume you already have people working on comprehensive training," Maria says, and Pepper gives the strained smile of _oh god why can't I just drown people_. 

"And yelled at them to go back and _listen_ to the cultural advisory team twice," Pepper says. "Although that's going better now - we managed to settle on the right people in a few key positions, which is why I love my internship program. I can snag them when they're brand new and make sure they never leave and don't burn out on me, and it's wonderful." 

Maria reserves judgement on exactly what she's going to need to do to StarkSec, because she wants to sit down and look this over and maybe steal a few extra eyes on the issue before she even starts putting things in motion. 

She's pretty sure that what she'll want to do is a _comprehensive_ assessment of who she's already got, find the right person and put them on-site with the best possible existing staff and a _good_ training support team - it'll make Maria's job a bit more full of headaches, but she can handle that here on the ground in the US, whereas the optics in Assam are going to need to be as close to perfect as possible - and then have _them_ start training the local-hired employees and phase over to entirely local as appropriate. 

But she's not _100%_ sure, so she wants to look at it hard first. Fuck - she hopes Priti survived, that Maria's _right_ in tentatively deciding she's probably not HYDRA (because you'd think, you'd _think_ , but Maria has more than enough experience with the shit that people do that's against their own self-interest by any sensible measure . . . ), and that Maria can coax her over. There are other area experts who probably survived Insight, but Priti's the best. 

Damn, she needs to make notes. But she's too tired right now. 

When they get to the end of all of that, Maria absolutely feels the momentary shift in mood, even before Eva and Pepper exchange a look, the glance that always means the same thing: someone asking _now?_ and the other person replying, _yes, now_. 

So Maria gives them each the eyebrows-up look that follows up the conversation with _okay, now what?_

Pepper takes a deep breath, looking like she's steeling herself. But it's Eva who asks, in the oblique-casual tone that knows damn well it's fooling nobody but is going to keep the act up anyway, because that sends its own message, "Are you aware of what Captain Rogers is doing?" 

Maria looks at her and then closes her eyes. Takes a deep breath. And says, "Jesus Christ that's the most terrifying fucking question I've been asked in years." 

 

They explain. 

Mostly, Eva explains. Her voice is crisp, matter-of-fact, and her explanation is exactly the right balance of brief and detailed. The professional side of Maria's mind appreciates that. The rest of her . . .

Maria feels a weird kind of displacement, because she knows exactly what it is she's seeing on Pepper's face, as Eva explains. It's the kind of thing that's been very normal in Maria's life, the last ten years. Tightening jaw, posture and position of the arms and everything else still staying technically open and undefended, but with the fingers of the hand resting on the arm-rest curling in underneath the palm. It's not a fist, exactly. But it wants to be. 

The recognition comes with displacement, because it's not really something her subconscious expected to see on Pepper Potts' face. That's stupid: Maria knows that immediately, in the kind of retrospect that comes right after you have the first thought. Frankly, given her life since Stane decided to have Stark killed, it's amazing that Pepper has whatever post-traumatic crap she suffers under such excellent control, to the point where articles after the AIM incident kept remarking on how "tough" she apparently was. 

At least after they finished implying that her new impatience with total stupidity was bitchy hysteria. 

That took them less time than Maria would've expected, probably because while Pepper stopped putting up with the stupidity, she did it with that kind of dry patience that didn't leave the people she was shutting down with any way to complain that didn't make them sound like whiny babies. Many of them complained anyway, and did in fact sound like whiny babies, but it's hard to keep up momentum with that kind of thing. So they seemed to get bored with it early, and switch to lauding Pepper's Toughness in ways that absolutely had the benefit of implying that _other_ people whined too much. 

Maria suspects it has a lot more to do with having the sense to do things like go hang out with comforting horses for a while, and also keep the press out of her private life. But that doesn't mean that Maria shouldn't know better. 

Personally, Maria has to stand up about halfway through the explanation, her own agitation translating to bodily movement because that's better than screaming. Eva pauses for maybe a thin-sliced half of a heart-beat, but Maria waves her hand and says, _No keep going, I'm listening_. Just right now she has to be standing to listen. Sitting on a nice comfortable piece of furniture feels much, much too dangerous. 

In her head she can see the room under the dam. She can fucking smell the place. She can see Steve's face, and the emptiness on Natasha's and remembers the moment, remembers knowing three things - one, that Steve was right; and two and three, that if Nick didn't _shut the fuck up_ Steve was going to do something everyone would regret and Nat wouldn't even try to stop him. 

She likes to think that in that memory she also saw on Wilson's face that he, like Maria, totally understood what was going on, and it's just that he had no leverage and she might, _might_ be able to get Nick to stop. Maybe. 

_I do what he does, just slower._ He'd says something like that. Fuck. But yes: yes, Maria does in fact fucking believe everything Eva's telling her, right now. 

She absolutely fucking believes that what happened after Steve stopped answering her on comms is he threw his fucking earpiece away and saved what was left of Barnes and then lay down and said _fine kill me if you want to_ and she absolutely _fucking_ believes that now Steve's thrown himself into finding the man and damn what anyone, what everyone thought. 

Fuck. 

_Fuck_. 

Maria really, really needs someone, _someone she knows gets it_ , not to be dead or inaccessible right now, and she can't think of anyone who'd fucking fit the bill. 

"As far as we know," Eva concludes, without even waiting for Maria to actually ask, "Rogers has no comprehensive plan for what to do if and when he does find Barnes." 

"No," Maria says, hearing her own voice as if from a distance. "No, strategy is _not_ Rogers' strong point." 

She pinches the bridge of her nose. Okay no: no. She has a job to do. She can cling to that, and sort the rest out later. Find some way to deal with it _later_. "Where is he now?" she asks. 

"JARVIS?" Pepper says, pitching her voice a bit louder. It's also pretty calm and level, and Maria's impressed. Pepper's not really okay right now, but she hides it well.

(Of course she's not okay, part of Maria that sounds suspiciously like Phil says, kicking her in the head. Think about why she cares about this at all, Hill - she's a lovely woman but the goodness of her heart accounts for maybe, maybe 30% of her investment here and that's being really generous. And yeah. Maria can see it. Real easily.) 

The voice of Stark's AI comes out of nowhere. "Captain Rogers and Mr Wilson are presently in Guatemala, although they are scheduled to return to the United States tomorrow morning, so I presume their search there has borne at best partial fruit. Both have travel-arrangements and valid visas for the Côte d'Ivoire in six weeks. Obviously, I am not privy to their reasoning." 

Maria drags her hand over her mouth. _Steve, you are the worst covert operative in the world._ Jesus fucking Christ, visas under their own names. 

Almost like Pepper can read her mind, and feels the need to offer a defense - almost, but not quite - she says, "JARVIS is on standing alert for anything that counts as a potential sign, and we've already got what contacts we have looking, since he asked Tony's help. I have no idea if he's in more contact with Natasha than we are, but if he is, then I assume he's got that as a potential resource. I almost think he's started travelling to chase some things down just to . . . " she shrugs. "I don't know. Make it obvious he's trying?" 

"Or just to keep from feeling useless," Maria says, taking a deep breath and folding her arms. She gives her own head a metaphorical smack or two, tells it to stop catastrophising and bewailing cruel fate and fucking work like a useful nerve centre, thanks. "Rogers does _not_ deal well with feeling useless." 

"Mmm, there's the voice of someone who had to find him things to do," Eva murmurs, a little dryly, and Maria has to acknowledge that. She looks at Pepper, who looks back. 

It's the look that, for the first time, makes Maria think that possibly the person SHIELD should have been really glad it never went head to head with was her. 

She's never lacked respect for Potts. Ever. Hell, she was the one who'd told Fury that he didn't dare let anyone _but_ Natasha take the SI infiltration op, because even if Stark was enough of a clusterfuck not to notice anything even if it punched him in the face, Potts _would_ notice, and trying to get through her would be like trying to get through granite with a hand-drill. But this is the first time she's considered that the woman could be genuinely frightening. 

Maria still doesn't feel _sorry_ for Killian, and never will; she just has a bit more contempt for him, here and now, because he probably didn't even realize as he was dying that he should've been afraid of his personal trophy all along. After all, Maria hasn't been in the same space as Pepper under real stress until now. Killian had hours to figure it out. 

"You're going to offer Steve shelter and support if and when he does find Barnes, and Washington freaks out," Maria says, to get it out and articulated. 

"Washington, or anyone else," Pepper says, the same cool flatness in her eyes right there in her voice. "And yes, just as far as you're thinking. If I have to." 

She doesn't correct the singular pronoun. 

It probably won't go that far. Maria knows that, actually. 

Not that Washington wouldn't unload on the man if they had the chance - they _are_ desperate for scapegoats, because too many people too high up into too many institutions were in Pierce's pocket at best and outright HYDRA-faithful at worst. Between the ones they can't get at - some of them because they've fled where money or whatever else they bring is more important than who they used to be, others because the evidence can't get past the lawyers, others because of who knows what blackmail and skeletons are all over the damn place - and the ones that they can get at but it won't help them to string up, that they'll probably have to anyway and take the hits, well. 

Being able to get The DC Assassin and use him as the symbolic sacrifice would seem like a godsend, as well as really damn easy to sell, as long as you assume that the only person you'll be going up against is Steve. Sure, Steve is the hero of the hour right _now_ , but strategy really isn't his strong point, he's not good at _not_ being an asshole under stress, and it's not like the USA doesn't have a fine old history of turning on its heroes when they seem to fuck up. 

But that whole calculation dissolves when you put SI in the way - fuck, the same way that Maria's counting on it dissolving for _herself_. It's based on being able to sweep shit through fast, before people start asking inconvenient questions. It's based on being an unstoppable force and railroading the whole thing through the way you want it. Long and honourable tradition. 

But it crashes and burns the minute you put a nice hefty wall in front, like SI, and people start having time to ask those questions. 

And there are _plenty_ of people who'd be willing to ask those questions. There's places and people willing to shout those questions and to add themselves to the wall once they have a chance. 

Maria's already listing them in her head, automatic reflex, of just the _places_ they could stick Steve and Barnes, assuming that the US gets too hot and Barnes hasn't already killed everyone (because Jesus Christ, Steve - ) - France would do it just to give the US the middle finger, Germany probably would and wouldn't that be ironic, maybe Australia or New Zealand. Fuck, last she'd paid attention _Canada's_ PM was headed for a no-confidence vote and nobody thought he'd come through it, so there'd be a new government there. Extradition treaties - well, those were all pretty shaky right now, the same way everything international is shaky right now. 

Iceland'd probably do it, especially if Thor asked them to. Israel, for sure, although fuck Steve could get himself into some trouble there really fast unless someone could shoehorn the idea of "nuance" and "discretion" into his head, and Maria wouldn't bet on it. And that's just off the top of her head. 

Fuck. She wonders if Thor could give them space in Asgard. But that means she has to actually think about _that_ shit and she's not getting paid for that anymore. Yet. 

Pepper's gaze stays absolutely steady. She says, quietly, "All of Killian's other victims died." There's no inflection in her voice now, which is pretty textbook, and yeah - yeah Maria's been thinking around that one, and everything to do with it, letting those implications unfold and settle before she takes a hard look and processes them, but now'll work okay. "Every single one." 

And, Maria thinks but doesn't say, at least they signed up for it. They were lied to, they were used, the infection rotted their brains - well, cooked their brains, every time they ran hot, damaging cerebral tissue faster than it could heal it back up so it healed with weird seams and scar-tissue. Made for constant traumatic brain injury, and everything to go with it. 

She'd had all the footage of the investigation afterwards, all the interviews. Relatives talking about how sweet and kind their loved one used to be, even after you've found the backyard full of bodies? Isn't exactly rare. But being able to lay out an entire life history that really does show it, show how radical the change was . . . is a bit more rare. Most of the families could do that. 

And Barnes is just that, writ exponentially larger, and longer, and worse. Is another story made out of the same shit. Right down to the powers that be throwing their arms around the torturer and inviting him in to set up shop, because they wanted his toys so bad they weren't going to look too hard at anything. 

Maria could point out that this is probably going to end the same. That they probably can't . . . that Barnes probably can't just - 

That he probably won't survive for the same fucking reason the Extremis victims didn't. Couldn't. 

But Pepper's not stupid. Neither is Stark, at least . . . not this kind of stupid, and that's maybe more relevant, because frankly if anyone has to take Barnes down it's going to be Stark, Banner, Thor. Steve. Whether he likes it or not. And if that's how it plays out then the problem solves itself. Again. So there's no point talking about it. 

And besides: she could point it out, but she's sure Steve wouldn't care. Which means he'll still do this anyway. Which means they still have to deal with _that_ , and Pepper's still right about the rest of it. So - 

Maria exhales all at once. "Okay," she says, shoving her brain into gear again. "Scratch what I said earlier." 

At Pepper's raised eyebrows Maria puts her hands out to lean on the back of the semi-couch and says, "I'll be hiring _all_ the ex-SHIELD people I consider worth a shit, assuming they survived and I can convince them to come in. I'll also be writing up a list of independents I think are worth signing and I can talk into it and - fuck." 

Maria closes her eyes and considers the likelihood - assuming they survived - of _any_ of the Level 6s or 7s being willing to sign with _anyone_ , ever again, and shakes her head. "If and when Steve does manage to pull this off and the fan speeds up to get ready for the shit, there's probably going to be two or three contractors I'll want to call," she says. "Because you're gonna need _at least_ that, even if it's only to do heavy posturing." 

She stands up and folds her arms again. And Pepper looks relieved, the just-too-long blink and inhale Maria expected, but Eva - Eva's almost got a smirk, except it's not malicious enough to be a smirk, and there's too much of an edge of delight to it. Maria raises her eyebrows. 

"You just win a bet or something?" 

Eva pretended just a sparkle of innocence before readily admitting, "No, Pepper wouldn't take it." 

"Never take a bet she offers," Pepper says, with the kind of mild resentful irritation that's mostly just letting some other kind of emotion flash off into play-crabbiness, something Maria's way, way too familiar with. "Not if you actually want to keep whatever you put up as stake. And honestly, Maria - do I need to repeat what I said before?" 

"I wasn't going to go for a couple hundred of them before," Maria retorts. "But if you're willing to threaten the Second American Civil War over this, not only do I want as many people that have the skills you'll need as I can get, I also want as many people as possible who are _already_ willing to throw themselves under a bus for Steve's stupid ass. And every single surviving SHIELD-loyal person on this planet would take a bullet for that asshole right now, and I want that and I'd like to encourage and nurture it. Like a fucking garden."

That's not really fair, but she's too fucking . . . _something_ to give a damn right now. 

"Good point," Eva murmurs, and Pepper's nodding, but Maria's already thinking. 

"Are we in contact with Thor?" she asks, frowning. "If we're not, we need to be." 

 

It's about two in the afternoon when Eva once again declares herself the disciplined one, this time to argue - pretty convincingly - that they've hit the point of chewing over the same points until some of the first delegated stuff gets done, and also that Maria looks like a fermenting dishcloth ("A lovely, competent, disciplined fermenting dishcloth," she says, serenely. "But seriously."), and should go pass out somewhere. 

Maria's almost reluctant. She knows exactly what's going to hit her once she's behind a closed door when she knows, can't avoid knowing, that actually there's nothing else for her to do and so no reason to keep the bulwarks up. The temptation to find work - a lot of work - to hide behind is strong. 

Which is the kind of thing that had at one point had Amanda Czajkowski standing in Maria's office door, telling her that she, Maria Hill, could voluntarily take the next couple days off and go home and process or she, Amanda Czajkowski, head of SHIELD's psych staff, would fucking sign Maria off as unfit for duty for the next two weeks and order a full psychological evaluation at the end of it, and by the way don't fucking glare at her like that this is her _job_ and she, Maria Hill, is a fucking mess heading straight into dangerous liability. 

Maria wonders if Amanda's still alive. 

So Maria agrees and takes the folders and things that Eva gives her. She goes back to the guest suite and closes and turns the deadbolt on the door. 

Then, after staring at the closed door for . . . too long, she finds the suite's stocked bar cart, pours herself a double of Jack and throws it back, strips out of the blouse and slacks and socks, knocks back another double of the booze, and crawls back into bed. 

 

The suite's phone, on the bedside table, wakes her up. She fumbles for the handset and answers it with, "Hill," as her groggy mind tries to put itself together, and reminds her why she'd used alcohol as a sleep-aid in the first place. 

"Sorry," Pepper's voice says, "I didn't mean to wake you." 

"No," Maria says, as she finishes waking up and gets reminded that she probably should have gotten rid of the bra too, before she decided to collapse, because then she wouldn't be being stabbed by the underwire now. She reaches behind her with her free arm as she sits up, undoing the close. "It's fine, I should've started waking up soon anyway. It's - " she glances at the clock, " - six, I should eat." 

"Hey freaky coincidence," Pepper says, the phrasing and her tone making it clear it's not at all a coincidence and she doesn't even want to bother pretending it is, "I'm calling to offer to bring down supper, if you'll tell me what you want-slash-don't-want and don't mind company." 

Maria _rapidly_ considers the idea of eating alone and how _shitty_ that's going to feel and says, "I'd love company," and then, "and honestly right now I'd eat a fucking Cliff bar." 

Pepper says about twenty minutes, and Maria crawls into the shower. 

Her laundry's already all been done, and it's all folded and put away in the dresser. Maria pulls out a pair of sweats, one of her older sports-bras, and a t-shirt. She also goes back to the bar and this time pours herself some of the Glenlivet, with just enough water to open it up, because she plans to at least taste a little of it. 

That's about when what has to be the door-chime sounds, and it's Pepper with what turns out to be Mongolean BBQ. The smell makes Maria's stomach wake up and tell her that she's _ravenous_. 

"I don't promise to stay sober," she warns, without any other preamble. "Or cheerful." 

"Oh good," Pepper replies, matching her tone, "it looks bad when I drink alone." 

It turns out she brought herself beer, and it's probably not nice but Maria can't help saying, "I'm surprised you can get away with drinking Stella." 

"Tony and I have an understanding," Pepper says, serenely. She's pulling stuff out of the kitchenette, which she obviously knows the layout for, wide flat bowls and chopsticks and the rest of it. "He says shit about my beer, he sleeps alone." She gives Maria a sardonic look. "Besides, he'll live on chlorophyll smoothies and ramen, his house isn't even fucking made of glass it's made of wet tissue-paper." 

She transfers the food from takeout containers to real dishes and then actually puts the garnishes on - Maria's impressed. "So," Pepper goes on, "as one actual human being to another - how are you feeling?" 

Maria sighs. She takes the bowl that Pepper hands her and moves to the table, Pepper right behind her. "Like shit," she says, frankly. "Afraid of how much worse I'm going to feel when I actually start figuring out who's dead, or who turns out to have been HYDRA. I dunno which is worse." 

"JARVIS grabbed the whole database drop," Pepper tells her. "He says finding targeted information in them isn't that difficult - it's just sheer volume, particularly for the hidden files, makes just going through them just unbelievably huge, as a project. He should be able to at least help it not take so long." 

"Yeah, well," Maria says, pausing in wolfing down the food to take a drink of her scotch, "you're not wrong about my paranoia. It's not like I don't already have ideas about who I'm going to find on what side when I start looking. I just want to be wrong." 

"Paul Serrano - the fucker who almost brought us down, Insight Day - he bought me get-well flowers after Extremis," Pepper says, and it's a kind of agreement. "And he basically mentored the woman who had to shoot him." 

"Who was that, by the way?" Maria asks; she'd sort of mentally flagged that as something to follow up on the second Pepper'd said it, and now seemed as good a time as any. 

"Amelia Stone," Pepper replies. "She was going off-shift when shit hit the fan, he'd gone down to the switch-room supposedly just to check up. The Tower's configured to run completely closed circuit if we need to," Pepper explains. Maria's eyebrows go up: that hadn't actually made it to any of the SHIELD specs. Then again, she's pretty sure a _lot_ of the post-Chitauri design of the building hadn't made it into anything SHIELD had. Stark Paranoia was an amazing thing. 

"Handy," Maria says. 

"And I mean _completely_ ," Pepper repeats after drinking some of her beer. "Power, obviously, but water, sewage, all of it. That switch takes us off the phones, too, and disconnects us from anything more than radio. That one's the full-bore kill switch," she adds. "There's others that do it in pieces, but the point of that one is to turn this place into a self-sustaining fortress, even if it's a digital attack. There's always one person down in the room and one stationed at the door to the stairs and ramp, but since it's the most fucking boring guard duty in the universe, they switch off after four hours each, each shift, and we only put them on that duty for a few months at a time. A lot of the time - " 

" - people who've been sick or injured or overworked, I bet," Maria says, and nods when Pepper does, as she finishes the last of her food. "Smart. You just need someone human and alert to hit the button when the alarm goes - you need a real person, but not to do much." 

"Basically," Pepper says. "Anyway, Stone'd been the one down in the thing, the shift was changing, Stone was a bit late leaving and ran into Serrano coming down the stairs. I guess he didn't want to kill her outright, since she was supposed to be leaving so she might be missed, or I dunno, maybe he liked her and thought she'd be far enough away not to get killed in the crossfire, fucking . . . whatever - so he said he just had to talk to her replacement. When she got to the top of the stairs, the _other_ person wasn't anywhere to be seen. 

"Thank fuck," Pepper says, picking up her bottle of beer and sitting back, "that girl was conscientious because there wasn't any sign of foul play - the only thing wrong was the other person wasn't at their post. She decided to look for them instead of just getting out and starting her weekend, and couldn't find them."

Pepper takes a drink. "Turns out he'd hidden the body in a trash-can and cleaned up," she says. "He was functional head of Security, he had the access to fuck with the cameras so nobody would notice. And he'd been here for years, he'd been here since fucking Howard fucking Stark was still alive. He did the same thing down at the bottom, so when Stone went back to tell him that whoever it was was missing, he actually managed to convincingly claim he'd sent the other guard to go get a coffee because she'd had a rough night, pretended to check in and ask someone to look for the other guy, and Stone was almost leaving again, and that was when shit hit the fan." 

Suddenly, Pepper looks both guilty, proud, and kind of wicked. "We'd actually hacked the cameras in the Triskelion," she says, and Maria actually does choke a little and stares at her. Pepper shrugs, obviously delighted and still kind of guilty. "Tony put himself in the hospital with the malaria, okay," she says. "Except not because at that point in time I didn't have anything to threaten him with to keep him in the hospital, so he just ended up technically in the infirmary floor here. God, he is the worst patient ever. Anyway. He was actually pretty damn upset when the news hit and was saying Fury died. 

"We know he's not dead," Pepper adds, making Maria choke slightly again. Now she looks apologetic instead of guilty. "Rogers mentioned it. But Tony didn't actually believe it to start with. I thought he was just in denial." 

She shrugs. "But he insisted that unless and until he personally saw the body buried and knew it was the same body he personally had done a DNA test on . . . " 

Now Maria's laughing. Helplessly. Really - she can't help it. "Well he's not fucking wrong. Bastard." She's not sure whether she means Nick or Stark. Or maybe Steve. 

Fuck. And yeah okay so she's already seeing - now that she's thinking about it - that she'd have to spill the beans on that one too. Sure. But for fuck's sake, Steve. For _fuck's sake_. The longer she knows the guy the more she sympathises with the helplessly frustrated tone from the old SSR logs and reports, the more she wants to go back in time and - however much it would freak him the fuck out - put both hands on Phillips' shoulders and say, _I feel you, sir. I feel you so much right now._

"He came very, very fucking close," is what she says instead. " _He_ should probably still be in fucking medical care. But if you think Tony's bad, trust me, Nick is worse." 

" . . . I can probably believe that, actually," Pepper says, thoughtfully. "Hearing reports that Fury was dead made Tony freak the fuck out. I mean it freaked all of us out, but it _really_ freaked him out. I honestly couldn't tell if it was just . . . weird _issues_ to start with," she admits, a little shamefaced. "Because with Tony, and Fury, and Fury knowing Tony's dad and, well - " 

"Trust me - I have seen the proceedings of the private won't-admit-it unconditional Howard Stark Fanclub," Maria replies, "I know what you mean." She hesitates and adds, "To be fair, I'm pretty sure Stark Sr was pretty goddamn instrumental in Nick getting where he was, and really important to him." Which is putting it mildly - she kinda gets the feeling Howard Stark was the first white guy in charge of anything in any part of Nick's career that he didn't have to metaphorically scale like a fucking razor-wire topped wall lined with broken glass to get anywhere through, and that in contrast Howard Stark treated him . . .well, more or less like family. Went to bat hard for him with other top SHIELD and WSC assholes. That kind of thing. 

That's the kinda thing that's going to leave an impression. Especially in the fucking 70s. 

"Oh god, probably," Pepper says, laughing in a complicated way. "Trust _me_ , I've been with this company a while - as long as you weren't married to him or related to him, Howard Stark was one of the best guys in the world. Just . . . if you were married to him he cheated on you constantly, and wasn't that good at hiding it, and if you were his kid he had a messed up complex of jealousy and insecurity and other bullshit that, well." 

She makes a presenting gesture, Vanna White style. "Tada! Tony. And then you have Fury with the Howard Stark hagiographical version, and Tony's mixed up fucking feelings and like I swear you'd need a miracle to even get it untangled enough to see everything at work, but it's complicated and it's impossible to tell which of the available ways it could pull Tony is actually the one that's going to happen in any given moment. 

"Like: I can narrow it down to three to five possibilities," Pepper notes, taking another swig of her beer. "And it'll be one of them. But who the fuck knows which one. So honest to god, to start, I really kind of thought he was just . . . having _that_. But he _kept_ freaking out on me, and insisting that if Fury was even being realistically _targeted_ then something was off-the-charts wrong. He insisted _I_ try and contact Natasha, since she wasn't answering him." 

She sighs. "I pointed out that Fury was, as far as I could tell, pretty _important_ to her - " 

Maria's had too much to drink not to wince, but they both just sort of let that pass otherwise.

" - and maybe the last person in the world she wanted to talk to right now was someone like Tony, but I could not get him to go the fuck back to bed without agreeing to try, short of having someone put him there, and _that_ would end badly, so - I tried. And then I couldn't get ahold of her, which was a bit more weird - she usually answers me within a few hours, even if it's just to say 'busy'? Or I hit an 'out of the office' message on that number, and I didn't get either. But I figured hey maybe she's having a _really_ bad night." 

"And then the Causeway," Maria says, but Pepper shakes her head, lips pressed together. 

"Then the _quinjet_ ," she says. "And Rogers on the most wanted list. I mean, I know Tony doesn't have a lot of . . . _positive_ stuff to say about Rogers," she says, like she's examining her words carefully before she uses them. "I mean, he built him a Tower floor, but Tony's . . . complicated." 

Maria starts laughing, and Pepper makes a face, finishing the last of her food and then getting up and making a gesture towards the couches. On the way there she detours near the bar and comes back with a big bag of caramel-and-chocolate popcorn. 

"It's not like he actually says bad things about the guy," Pepper goes on. "He's just an asshole, like he is sometimes. Except now firstly the quinjet thing happened _at all_ and secondly Tony's telling me that if SHIELD is hunting Rogers, that means SHIELD's completely fucked up, and then thirdly - actually - somehow that _didn't_ become a national emergency, which you'd think it would." 

Maria raises a glass to acknowledge the point. It didn't, because Pierce was still trying to minimize everything. But for someone like Stark - 

"And then, still not the Causeway," Pepper says, opening the bag. "The surface-to-surface missile." 

" . . . right," Maria says. "Of course." 

"Yeah," Pepper says, drawing out the word, "like I do understand why he thought he could get away with it - Pierce, I mean - especially since he thought he had us handled and to be honest, if you guys hadn't saved the day he wasn't entirely wrong although I'm still not sure what he thought was going to happen with Bruce - " 

"He thought Banner would die in the attack," Maria says, honestly and bluntly. "Because the recording of the argument in the lab on the helicarrier was lost to the damage to the helicarrier, and Nick, Natasha and I all decided to keep Banner's little admission of his total invulnerability to ourselves." She smiles bleakly at Pepper's wide-eyed expression, and takes a swallow of her Glenlivet. 

"So he thought that blowing this place would actually kill the Hulk too," Pepper says, staring. 

"Mmhm," Maria replies. "Based on later assessment of a couple points in the Battle of New York, plus the fact that if you heavy-duty tranq Banner before he transforms the tranquillizers work, temporarily, that was the official take." 

"He didn't _know,_ " Pepper says, slowly, "that he would just have an absolutely fucking furious-beyond-imagining screaming green - " 

"Nope," Maria confirms. She puts her feet against the edge of the coffee table and rests the glass against her cheek. "Also don't think he realized Thor can survive a terminal-velocity impact with the ground, either, because we ah - we were slow about adding some of the details from the Battle and from the Greenwich Incident to the general files." 

Pepper keeps staring. Maria shrugs. 

"The Council's decision not just to nuke Manhattan but to bypass Nick to do it made us all a little paranoid," she says, "so we kept some stuff in our back pocket. I'm not sure if the Insight guns could have killed Thor or not, but I know Pierce wouldn't even think it was a problem, and they didn't know about Banner's experiment in eating a bullet. I mean, I'd've still been dead," she goes on, "and the world would still be a horror-show, but I do have to admit knowing they'd still have all died by ragemonster they made themselves afterwards - plus possibly infuriated alien superpowered prince - even if they had won . . . does kind of warm my heart at night." 

Pepper's eyes are still wide. After a moment she exhales. "Oh hell, we're gonna have to talk to Bruce about what he wants to do with that," she says. "We'd just assumed that was all in the files, and we _know_ the tranq information is, but that just means . . . " 

"If people know he's invulnerable they might try to deal with it that way first," Maria finishes. "Yeah. Anyway." She gets up to go get more scotch. 

"Yeah, anyway," Pepper echoes, clearing her head with a swig of beer. "Surface to surface missile: kinda can't hide that from us. That went to the first secure - _our_ secure - call with Rhodey. Because it turns out 'no shut up why the fuck did a surface-to-surface missile just hit Jersey' is a very effective stopper although - " she says, gesturing with the bag of chocolate-caramel-corn, " - it turns out, which I did not know, that he and Rhodey also _actually have a code worked out_ for one-sided phone conversations to deal with eavesdroppers, _and_ a first-word-out-of-your-mouth codeword to start it. Apparently dates from their college days. Anyway. 

"Rhodey didn't know fuck-all about the missile, which just meant . . .well, we were already on alert," she finishes, shrugging, "by the time the Causeway happened and I had to _fucking sit on Tony_ and the fact that that worked is the only reason he wasn't in the suit - yes," she says, as an aside, "he has a suit, actually so do I it's just mine's purely a safety-precautionary thing, we can talk about that later, there's just those two - anyway only because he literally couldn't even make me get off him, that's the only reason he wasn't in his suit and trying to fucking get there. He'd've been useless and he'd've been dead," she says, flatly. 

Maria'd detoured on her way to the couch past the same cabinet - Pepper's stop having shown her where it was - and grabbed the really good jerky that's inside. She's also just brought the scotch with her. "How bad was the malaria?" she asks, as she refills her glass, and Pepper actually shudders. 

"So turns out," Pepper says with horrible brightness, "that at least for the malaria parasite - or at least _this_ one - the modified Extremis _makes it worse_ , not better. Not because it actually makes it worse," she goes on, quickly. "That's not it. No, because it does fuck all to boost your immune system against the parasite, for some reason - one of the doctors had a theory, apparently this variety of the parasite fucks with the immune system anyway, but I have no fucking idea and I did not understand the explanation, I'll just admit that - so Extremis just ups your endurance when it comes to symptoms, which it turns out is _bad_ because suddenly you hit the parasite load where you can't _do that_ anymore and keel over and try to _die_ , but you do it without noticing because you've had negligible-to-mild symptoms so far." 

She takes a deep breath and finishes with, "So: bad. Really bad. Fucking scared me to death, came home to find him on the floor bad. Anyway." She takes another deep breath. Maria, sort of at a loss, eats some more of the jerky, and takes a note of the brand because this is _really_ good. 

"So yeah," Pepper goes on, " _now_ the Causeway, now we see Natasha there too, plus the guy we don't know, Wilson. Second secured call to Rhodey and Tony basically saying that if Natasha _and_ Rogers are both on the same side you basically know it's the right one, because Rogers is an idealistic crusader idiot, and, I quote, 'Romanoff's single overriding motivation is keeping idiot civillians safe, even if she has to drive over the bodies of non-civillians in a flaming tank to do it, so whatever she's doing it's going to be what's going to keep the most people out of harm's way,' unquote." 

That . . .is not what Maria would have expected to hear, from Stark, about Natasha. At all. She stares at Pepper, who shrugs with one palm up and the other hand holding the bag. "That's . . . both accurate and oddly sweet," Maria says, "and I'm actually very weirded out that I'm saying that about Tony Stark's assessment of Natasha Romanoff." 

"I know," says Pepper, "trust me, I wasn't any better. But apparently that argument was compelling, that if you've got both of those on one side, the other side is the _wrong_ side, which means something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Or, in this case, SHIELD. So there we were - not much Rhodey could do at that point, but at least he was on alert. Which brings us back to us hacking SHIELD's cameras - at that point we got JARVIS to start working on getting us any access to the Triskelion we could _get_. Which wasn't much, all dues to your computer people." 

"Fury was a _little_ upset Tony managed to hack the database on the helicarrier," Maria says, in what is now officially her biggest understatement of the year. He hadn't even yelled, he'd been that angry. Apparently some of the techs had literal nightmares about that briefing after the fact. 

"I don't know how JARVIS got into the cameras," Pepper says, holding up one hand like she's deflecting a question, "that is _not_ my field of expertise. But apparently the cameras and the microphones were one unit, which means - " 

"You got Steve's speech," Maria finishes for her, nodding slowly. "Yeah, that'd do it." 

"Did he practice that?" Pepper demands, like her train of thought got derailed. 

"No," Maria says, sighing at the memory, "no, I'm pretty sure that son of a bitch made it up on the spot and trust me it was even more stupidly moving when you could see him, the bastard." 

"Holy shit," Pepper says. 

She eats a few more bites of popcorn and then shrugs. "Like three words in we were re-directing it to the whole Tower on speaker _and_ figuring out how to get it on every fucking actual government or law enforcement screen we could get at, because obviously that needed to get out and we could always show our work after it was done. But meanwhile downstairs, Amelia Stone's _just about to leave_ when this happens. And fortunately for us and possibly this whole country, Serrano's fucking gun jammed. So he slammed her head into the wall instead. I think he thought he killed her." 

"He didn't," Maria says, because that's an easy surmise. 

"No," Pepper confirms. "And he obviously wasn't top-tier on the action side because it didn't occur to him to shoot her just to make sure - maybe he couldn't make the gun work, I don't know. She could - when she came to she broke his knee, got the gun off him and shot him in the head and then turned the damn Tower back _on_. She's out of the hospital now," Pepper adds. "So far she's had a textbook easy concussion recovery, knock on wood - " and Pepper does. "She deserves a fucking medal, and _trust me_ she's gotten a raise and we're looking at other shit, because if she hadn't been so goddamn conscientious about checking on why her colleague wasn't at his station we would not have been able to get Rhodey's armour off the ground. 

"Meanwhile apparently one of Ellis' aides tried to kill him," Pepper goes on, and gets up to get another beer, and while she's at it brings Maria's scotch over. "Rhodey killed the aide instead and then dealt with the fucking tech that had managed to sabotage the armour, and then called us. JARVIS managed to hack enough of the satellite to tell us who the targets were, but he said he wouldn't be able to get through the algorithms to shut it down _before_ it fired on us, so that was fun. Tony told JARVIS to make fucking sure that nobody did anything to Wilson's wings - " 

It wasn't that Maria hadn't thought of the possibility of someone hacking Wilson's wingsuit. She _had_. She'd just consigned it, with so many things, to "well if that happens we're all dead." It's nice to know, in retrospect, that someone was looking after that even if she'd just had to pray at the time. She's not good at praying. 

" - and yeah, there were a couple of attempts, and meanwhile Tony and Rhodey got Rhodey's armour going and right about then you guys did your thing and . . . " she gestures with the bag one more time. 

"Then Tony collapsed again," Maria says, remembering what Pepper said in the hotel. Pepper nods, her mouth full of caramel corn. 

"Then a few days later Rogers came here, and talked to Tony," she says. "Then Tony talked to me, and I found out that big flashbacks _really_ suck." She drinks some more beer and says, "So since Tony needed to go back to the fucking infirmary and I was clearly not going to be able to think my way out of a paper bag, we called Eva. And that's been life since the fucking Nazis tried to take over the world again. That, and refusing to let it fuck up the plant, because it turns out I'm kind of stubborn about some things." 

She sighs. "Washington's a shit-show right now, Maria," she says, frankly. "I don't know if Ellis is panicking or if he's just lost so much credibility in his own circles that they're pushing it all or _what_ , but it's a fucking mess, and I'm just fucking glad there is a full two years to the next election because if it were closer I wouldn't just be _really worried_ about what's going to come out of this, I'd be fucking terrified." 

"That's about what I expected," Maria says, sigh echoing Pepper's. Then she adds, because she picks up Pepper's sudden awkwardness, "And in case you're wondering I always end up talking about work when people come over to hang out outside of work, so actually this is kind of - I don't want to say comforting, but . . . " 

Pepper laughs. "Okay," she says. "Because I was about to apologize, honestly?" 

"I could tell," Maria says. She pours herself a bit more scotch and shakes her head. "But I'm gonna tell you, Pepper," she says, letting herself be as somber as she feels. "I get it, you're even right, but I _have_ to tell you - the guy Steve's looking for is really, _really_ scary. If it turns out someone - " she sighs, and stops, and just says it. "It might turn out just like the other Extremis victims," she says. "And if it does it's going to be Tony, maybe Thor, Banner, Rhodes, who's going to have to take him out because _no one else_ is gonna be able to." 

"Tony says Rogers is absolutely adamant the guy saved his life," Pepper says, neutral. Maria closes her eyes. 

"Yeah, he's probably right," she admits, thinking of the wreckage she watched fall, after Steve told her to punch it. "But he didn't stick around and he hasn't tried to get in contact with anyone, so that just means that even he doesn't know what he's fucking going to do now, I'm pretty sure. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just . . . " She laughs, bleakly, and wrests her glass against her temple. "I'm telling you the worst-case scenario, and how likely that is," she says. "Because it's my job." 

Pepper smiles, slightly, and toasts her with the popcorn bag. 

Maria winces, as the second thought skates across her mind. She says, "And actually that's not the worst case," she says. "The worst case is, all that happens, _and_ we have to go through Steve to do it." 

Now Pepper does seem to think about that. She's silent for a couple minutes, staring into the middle distance and eating a few pieces of her caramel-corn. "Considering how little I trust anyone who's managed to get themselves into power right now," she says, slowly, but definitely, "the fact of the matter is, I'd rather we were making that call than anyone else was." 

That . . . 

That's probably it, right there. Maria nods. "You're right." 

Then Pepper puts the bag aside, pushes herself to her feet and says, "But now? No more scotch, it's too heavy, you can have beer or coolers or something, but now we're going to watch something stupid and funny until you fall asleep and then I'm going to go fall asleep, and this is me being completely controlling and overstepping my bounds but I'm going to just say I like you, and you're not sitting alone here with a bottle of scotch and _that_. That's bullshit." 

And she's not wrong. 

 

Maria wakes up the next morning with a milder hangover. She's on the couch, but there's a blanket tucked around her, another bottle of Pedialyte, some painkillers and fruit from the fruit-basket on the coffee-table in front of her, and a note with an untidy scribble of a phone-number and _my massage-therapist Bambi (yes really)_ beside it. 

It could be worse.


End file.
